Smitten Saturdays: Grapefruit Olive Oil Pound Cake

I have always loved grapefruit, although I’ve never cooked with it. For me, grapefruit is relegated to breakfast, halved and sectioned and sprinkled with a scant half-teaspoon of sugar. This is a practice cultivated in me by my paternal grandmother, Margaret, who would serve me grapefruit in this way during my visits to her home in Florida. In many ways, most of my memories of Meme are mediated through food: grapefruit, her delicious Christmastime almond tarts, egg salad with real mayo (which I did not care for as a child, but have since seen the error of my ways). Running through these food memories also unlocks scenes of hours of swimming in the pool in her subdivision, marveling at the magnificent (and kind of terrifying) thunderstorms that would rattle her carport, and developing my own sardonic sense of humor at her knee.

Even though I mostly visited Meme (and ate grapefruit for breakfast) in the summer, as I’ve grown into adulthood and seasonal eating, I associate grapefruit with wintertime. A Ruby Red goes nicely halved and served with a warm bowl of oatmeal, or cut into supremes and tossed with spinach, balsamic vinaigrette, pomegranate seeds, and pecans for a nutritious salad. But when we realized we were going to be homebound for the holidays, our travel plans to Arizona kiboshed by flu, we formulated a Plan B: the BK and I would spend Christmas Eve down the road at my folks’ place, while the ill LK would stay at home with my husband. I decided to make this pound cake to take with me to Christmas Eve dinner at my dad’s house as a gesture to Meme and how important spending time together — parents, grandparents, and children — is during the holiday season.

This cake (p. 241) was incredibly easy to make and is, to my mind, the most gorgeous of any of the Smitten Kitchen recipes I’ve made, ever.

You’ll notice that I let some pulp sneak into the glaze; I thought it added a kind of visceral authenticity to the cake, but such a choice might not be for everyone. I liked how the juice from the Ruby Red grapefruit gave the glaze a pinkish tinge, and the syrup gave the crumb a nice sweet-tart kick (I suppose if you wanted to go crazy, you could add a little rum to the syrup and turn this into a grapefruit olive oil rum cake). The cake itself isn’t terribly sweet, but the glaze should help satisfy even the most aggressive sweet tooth.

Next time: Slow Cooker Black Bean Ragout (p. 137) with a bonus that will surely have my children howling for my head on a platter, Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Tacos with queso fresco (p. 143).